Tag Archives: Led by Donkeys

The fun hasn’t gone out of British politics yet

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Once Britain’s Conservative government was booted out, it looked like the grownups, in the form of a shiny new Labour government, were in charge at last. In other words, it looked like the fun had gone out of politics, but have hope: humanity’s most absurd qualities haven’t been banished. 

This is admittedly gossip and rumor, but it’s credible enough for a responsible paper, the Guardian, to have trusted it: low-level guerilla warfare is going on inside 10 Downing Street between Sue Gray, the prime minister’s chief of staff, and Morgan McSweeney, who was his election strategy wizard and is now his head of political strategy. 

The plan was for McSweeney’s desk to sit outside the prime minister’s office, since he would be in and out of there more than Gray, but apparently Gray has moved McSweeney’s desk away from the prime minister’s door. Twice. Which implies that he’s moved it back at least once. She’s also (allegedly) tried to block his access to a secure computer system that would let him get security briefings.

There’s hope for humanity yet.

A nearly relevant photo, but you’ll have to read to the end to find out why. This isn’t the cat in the news but our own Fast Eddie in the foliage.

 

Exit Liz Truss, pursued by a head of lettuce 

Admittedly, though, the Conservatives were more fun. Watching them run the country was kind of like watching a classroom full of six-year-olds try to make a pie from scratch after the adult’s been called away: a lot to laugh at, but now that their parents have taken them home and, we hope, washed their clothes, there’s a real mess to clean up.

I’m not on the clean-up crew, so allow me to call your attention to Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 49 days. During the final stretch, disaster was so clearly headed her way that a newspaper put a livecam and a blond wig on a head of lettuce and asked if it would last longer than Truss.

Or maybe she was in office for 45 days. Or 50. For reasons that I won’t try to understand, different sources are coming up with different numbers. Whichever one we pick, she still holds the record for the country’s shortest-serving prime minister and the lettuce outlasted her, but that hasn’t stopped her from publishing a book, Ten Years to Save the West–an ambitious goal for a politician who couldn’t save her own premiership. And more than a quarter of that first year is gone already. 

Modesty prevents me from making fun of anything more than the title since I haven’t read it. 

The reason she’s back in the headlines is that she walked out of her own book event in August, which must also set some kind of a record. A crowd-funded group called Led by Donkeys had installed a hidden banner above the stage. When they lowered it by remote control, it read, “I crashed the economy.” Inevitably, it included a picture of a head of lettuce. 

Truss said, “That’s not funny,” and walked off stage. End of event. She has since accused Led by Donkeys of stifling free speech, although nothing they did kept her from speaking and a banner can also be considered speech. In fact, interrupting someone can be considered free speech. 

Led by Donkeys calls itself an accountability project and says the new government will inevitably “disappoint us in some, if not more, respects . . . so it’s inconceivable that we won’t turn our attention in a really direct way to what the government is doing.”

I can hardly wait.

 

What’s it worth to be booted out of office?

In the year after she stepped down as prime minister, Liz Truss made £250,000 in speaking fees. In one speech, she took in more than most of her fellow citizens earn in a year.

Suella Braverman made £60,000 as a speaker, although I’m not sure about the time period on that. She also made £14,000 for newspaper articles in the Telegraph and accepted an all-expenses paid trip to Israel worth £27,800. A mere nothing, but then she wasn’t prime minister. She never got past home secretary.

The top earner is Boris Johnson, who made £4.8 million in the six months after he stepped down, £2.5 million of which is an advance on some unspecified number of speeches. I haven’t seen a breakdown of the rest of his income, but I’d think twice before paying him an advance on so much as a piece of toast, even if I was looking at both bread and toaster. He got an £88,000 advance (or “a rumoured” £500,000–go figure) in 2015 for a book on Shakespeare.  

What does he actually know about Shakespeare? Indications are, not much. In 2021, a leading Shakespeare scholar was approached to help him with his homework by answering questions for Johnson. “The originality and brilliance, his agent assured me, would lie in Mr Johnson’s choice of questions to ask and in the inimitable way in which he would write up the expert answers he received,” the scholar said when he went public about it.

The book has yet to appear–or from what I’ve read, make its way to the publisher, but that hasn’t stopped him signing a £510,000 deal to write his political memoirs–for a different publisher. 

And I still don’t have my toast.

*

To prove there’s no justice in this world, the lettuce–which, you’ll remember, outlasted Truss–ended up on the compost heap. 

 

Meanwhile, in Cananda . . .

 . . . a totally separate Conservative Party aired a feel-good election ad, full of patriotic hoorah about how much they love Canada. You know the kind of thing: a Canadian father drives through the suburbs, only it turns out that was shot in North Dakota. The kids in school? That was from Serbia. The university student? Ukraine. The kid in the park with her grandparents? London. The two jets on a training mission, “getting ready to defend our home and native land”? Russia.  

And the sunset with the words “we’re home”? Venezuela. 

The ad has been pulled.

 

And in nonpolitical news . . .

. . . Larry Richardson is the author of a dozen academic papers on mathematics that have been cited 132 times. Larry Richardson is also a cat and, disappointingly, his papers are gibberish. 

Larry was boosted into academic stardom by his person’s grandson, a grad student in metascience and computational biology, who had run into the academic trick of getting your papers cited by either writing the papers citing you or paying someone else to do that for you. This matters, because the more a scientific paper is cited, the more important its author becomes. It influences hiring and tenure decisions. If you’re a cat, it gets you headlines.

Not that you care about headlines if you’re a cat. 

The papers that cite you can be gibberish as long as they have a plausible title. In fact, a program, MathGen, can produce them for you if you can’t be bothered writing your own nonsense. And  they can be written by long-dead scientists and mathematicians. 

Ever wanted to have your paper cited by Galileo? It can be arranged. 

The papers can also be written by your grandmother’s cat. You upload them to ResearchGate, let GoogleScholar do its work, then delete them. Or leave them. What the hell, it’s your call. 

GoogleScholar doesn’t sound overly cautious about what it accepts as a scholarly paper. Someone got it to accept a cafeteria menu. The authors are C.S. Salad, P. Pack, B. Noodles, C. Fajitas, and R. Beans. If the hyperventilating comments on Twitter are to be believed, the paper’s been cited multiple times.

R.  Richardson’s goal was to make L. Richardson the world’s most-cited cat. It took two weeks but only one hour of that was actual work.

The cat whose record L. Richardson broke was E.D.C. Willard, whose human was theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington. Hetherington added E.D.C. to a single-author paper because he didn’t want to go back and change all the we’s to I’s. E.D.C.–also known as Felis Domesticus Chester Willard, or Chester to his friends–racked up a mere 107 citations. He went on to drop his coauthor and write a paper and a book chapter under his own name.

R.  Richardson assures the world that L. Richardson–who goes by Larry–has been compensated in some unspecified way for the use of his name. R. Richardson did not comment, but you can find his profile here. 

A king, three MPs, and a former prime minister walk into a blog post…

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Let’s catch up with the news from Britain. 

King Charles–

No, not the King Charles who looks like his mustache is trying to get away from him. That’s Charles I and he was killed in a long-gone civil war. Also not the King Charles who looks like Bob Dylan in his older, seedier incarnations. That’s  Charles II. We’re talking about the bland looking and entirely mustacheless Charles III, who was supposed to go to France on a state visit and do I have no idea what there. Pose for pictures. Shake hands. 

No. You don’t do that when you’re a king, do you? You get bowed to. 

Would the president of republican France (revolution; La Marseillaise; you remember all that stuff, right?) bow to a king and what does the king do if he won’t? How many diplomats would it take to cut a way through that thicket?

Irrelevant photo: a hyacinth

Sadly, we’re not going to find out because the visit’s been called off. Too many strikes in  France. Too many protests. It’s postponed until “calm returns.”

That’s doubly disappointing because unionized public sector workers had already announced that they wouldn’t be rolling out the red carpets or hanging the flags that a state visit demands, so we also won’t get to find out what a state visit’s like in the absence of red carpets.

But let’s use the moment to remind ourselves that a few very real somebodies really do have to roll out red carpets if they’re going to be in place at the right time. In this case, the somebodies work at France’s National Furniture Service and they–or at least some of them–are on strike and said in a statement, “We ask our managers to point out to the ministry of culture that any request for furnishings will be seen immediately by workers as a provocation.” 

Their managers didn’t say anything like that, however. They said the carpets had already been delivered and nonunion workers would roll them out.

Who should we believe? We’ll never know how the story would’ve ended, but we could compromise and say that there might’ve been a bit of grandstanding on both sides.

I do like that line about any request being seen as a provocation, though. It lays the groundwork for quiet negotiations.

 

How different is it in Britain?

To the limited extent that I understand Britain after having lived here for 18 years, the country likes to think of France as a volatile, strike-prone, and generally unBritish sort of place, but the similarities are as striking as the differences lately. I got as far as asking Lord Google “who’s on strike…” and he intuited the rest of my question by adding (I couldn’t help but think, wearily) “…today in the UK?” So yes, we’re a tad strike-prone ourselves these days. The long-running strikes by nurses’ an ambulance paramedics’ are on hold while they vote on the government’s well-under-the-rate-of-inflation offer–an offer made after the government spent months swearing it wouldn’t and couldn’t offer more than a peanut butter sandwich and a bourbon cream biscuit. 

But even in their absence, the list of late-March strikes (ongoing, upcoming, and recent) is long and included bus drivers, professors (a.k.a. university lecturers), junior doctors (they’re not all particularly junior, but that’s what they’re called anyway), rail workers, passport office workers, teachers, and–sorry, I’ve lost track. Others. 

Most of those are government employees or people whose jobs are linked to the government tightly enough that when the government zips up its wallet, no settlement beyond the level of a bourbon cream is possible. And as the government keeps telling us, its wallet is staying firmly zipped because raising pay is inflationary, and they just can’t have that. We’re in a cost-of-living crisisl. This is no time to add fuel to the fire. People will learn to live on what they have.

*

So what have Members of Parliament learned to live on? Two of them, former health secretary and general laughing stock Matt Hancock and disgraced former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, told the representative of a non-existent South Korean company that they’d charge £10,000 a day to join its international advisory board and help its “clients navigate the shifting political, regulatory and legislative frameworks” in the UK and Europe. 

Kwarteng also offered to set up a meeting with Boris Johnson, the “best campaigner you will ever see.”

A third MP, Graham Brady, chair of the Conservative Party’s powerful 1922 Committee, settled for a measly £6,000 a day plus £500 an hour, but he did say he wouldn’t be able to advocate for the company. On the other hand, he could offer it advice about who to approach in government. 

Nothing about any of that is illegal as long as the MPs declare the income, the proper magic feathers are waved over the appropriate paperwork, and the correct formulas are spoken in broken Latin. 

As the old song says, it’s nice (and completely non-inflationary) work if you can get it.

The sting was set up by the unpredictable and inspired campaign group Led by Donkeys.

 

How about Boris Johnson?

He wasn’t part of the sting–why bother?–but pound for pound he leaves these guys in the dust. In the (more or less) six months since he was run out of office, he’s pocketed just short of £5 million in outside earnings.

Outside of what? Why his £84,000 salary as an MP, of course. And hs assorted expenses. That puts his outside earnings at something like £25,000 a day, much of it for giving speeches.

Why would anyone want to listen to him? Sorry, the world’s a much stranger place than I can possibly take in, never mind explain, but I will say that paying the man to speak doesn’t guarantee that anyone listens.

 

Who else has outside earnings?

If you pile all our current MPs in a heap and empty their pockets (let me know in advance if you can; I’d love to take pictures), you’ll find that in the past year, collectively, they earned £9.6 million outside of their MPs salaries. That’s up from a mere £6 million in the 18 months prior to that. 

Of this year’s take, 90% went to Conservatives.

You can sort the numbers out differently, though. If you look at how many MPs from which parties held second jobs in their desperate efforts to make ends meet in inflationary times, it works out like this: Among the Conservatives, some 43% work second jobs. Or at least, Open Democracy classifies the work as second jobs, although a lot of it looks like freelancing to me. Never mind. I’m quibbling. Among Labour MPs, that’s 38%. Among Scottish National Party MPs, it’s  34%. Among Liberal Democrats, it’s 57%, and among the Democratic Unionists it’s 37%.

Be gentle with those last two percentages, though. Open Democracy gave the last bits of data in absolute numbers and I turned to Lord Google for help in percentifying them. It’s risky, leaving me to transport numbers from one location to another, so I’m not offering money-back guarantees.  

One of the mysteries of British editing is that not everyone seems to notice how useful it is to put statistics into parallel formats. I don’t get it. But never mind that. We’re close enough to see that the parties indulge roughly equally but that the big earners are the Conservatives.

None of those numbers include rental income or shareholdings, presumably because making money that way doesn’t take up an MPs valuable time or influence their policies, so it’s okay if they’re invisible. Or maybe gentlemen are expected to make their money that way, so no one keeps track.

 

But the government’s not standing idly by…

…while the country falls apart. It’s going to step forward decisively and ban the sale of nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas and give the police extra super-powers to test for it. Experts say the ban’s disproportionate and likely to do more harm than good, but what do they know? Something needs banning and by gum, this is indeed something.

 

In the meantime, elsewhere in the solar system

. . . an asteroid big enough to wipe out a city has slipped between the orbits of Earth and her moon without hitting either one. It was approached by representatives of a doomsday cult and invited–even begged–to make full physical contact, but after a brief study of Earth and its inhabitants declined to get involved. 

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An update on Hafiza 

Afghan artist Hafiza Qasimi has arrived in Germany on a three-year visa and is preparing to take part in an exhibition of Afghan artists and spend three months living and working in an artists village. In these days when most of what we hear is the sound of relatively safe countries slamming their doors in the faces of refugees, I’m happy to celebrate the freedom and safety of one brave human being. I only wish the opportunity didn’t come to us so rarely.

The pandemic update from Britain, political edition: Boris’s brain breaks Boris’s rules

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Back in March, Boris Johnson’s brain–that’s his advisor, who has a name of his very own, Dominic Cummings–was infected with Covid-19. Keep him in mind, because he’s the heart of the story, but as usual we need some background.

Britain had gone into lockdown by then, and had widely publicized guidelines on what that meant. Leaving home (defined as “the place you live,” because a lot of us weren’t clear about that) “to stay at another home is not allowed.”

The guidelines didn’t define that other home, the one you don’t live in and weren’t to go to. Presumably it was a place someone else lived, although it could also have been a second home–a place no one lived. 

That’s enough possibilities. If I go on, it’ll only get worse.

Unnecessary travel was banned. Unnecessary wasn’t defined, but let’s take a shot at it ourselves: If you were being chased by a bear, it probably would be okay to run down the street or take other evasive action. No bear? You stay in the home where you live.

Completely irrelevant photo: an azalea.

People who had the virus were told to self-isolate. That collision of words, self impaled on isolate, was created by a computer that hadn’t been fully briefed on the spoken language, but most of us accepted it. We were thinking about a deadly virus. 

And it wasn’t just people who had the virus who were supposed to self-isolate: So was anyone they had contact with. Because we had to stop the virus. And the whole thing was serious enough that the police could fine people who broke the rules.

The rules, admittedly, were still hazy. In the most extreme case I know of, the police scolded people for buying (or was it a store for selling?) chocolate Easter eggs, which unlike Red Bull aren’t strictly necessary. 

After a wobble or two, though, the line between necessary and unnecessary became clearer. What really mattered was the We Were Taking This Seriously. So seriously that Boris Johnson made a public appeal to our better natures, asking us not to go see Mom on Mother’s Day. 

And most people listened. They didn’t visit their mothers. They didn’t visit their elderly relatives in nursing homes. They didn’t say their goodbye to dying family members. Because this was the way to beat the virus and we were all in it together.

Except for Boris’s brain, who by that time knew he was ill and drove 260 miles, leaving a trail of virii behind him. And with him went his wife (who was also sick) and their kid. 

Why’d they do that? To get to his parents’s home (sorry: estate), because, hell, they needed help with childcare. What else were they to do?

Well, gee, what would anybody else do? Manage, probably. Not expose their parents, possibly, not to mention whoever they had contact with between the home where they lived and the where home they didn’t live. Turn to somebody local if they could–a relative, an organization that could help. See if a relative wouldn’t come to them, which wouldn’t be within the guidelines but would have been a hell of a lot safer.

I don’t minimize how hard the disease can hit people–a friend of ours died of it–but these are two people who were well enough to drive 260 miles but weren’t well enough to deal with their kid.

I admit, I don’t know their particular kid. 

We’ll skip the which-day-did-what-happen details. Someone local called the cops, who talked with someone at the home where they did not live.

“Oh, no, they didn’t,” 10 Downing Street says.

“Oh, yes, we did,” the police say. 

Cummings was seen 30 miles away from his parent’s estate, out in public, not self-isolating.

Cummings went back to London and returned to work at 10 Downing Street. 

A few days later, he was seen 30 miles from his parents’ estate again. 

“Oh, no, he wasn’t,” Downing Street says.

“Oh, yes, he was,” the witness says, “and I have the browser history to prove that I checked his license plate number at the time to make sure it was  him.” Except you don’t call it a license plate in Britain, but let’s not stop for that, we’re busy doing something else here.

The witness has filed a complaint with the police.

What does Boris’s brain have to say? That he did the right thing by driving to his parents’ estate.

What did Boris’s body have to say? “I believe that in every respect he has acted responsibly, and legally and with integrity and with the overwhelming aim of stopping the spread of this virus and saving lives.”

Other politicians and one scientific advisor who’ve been caught messing around with the lockdown rules have stepped down. 

Will Cummings? Like hell he will.

The steps under his feet aren’t looking overly solid, though. After Johnson’s press conference, Stephen Reicher, a scientific advisor to the government, tweeted, “In a few short minutes tonight, Boris Johnson has trashed all the advice we have given on how to build trust and secure adherence to the measures necessary to control COVID-19.,” and “It is very hard to provide scientific advice to a government which doesn’t want to listen to science.”

Not to mention, “Be open and honest, we said. Trashed.

“Respect the public, we said. Trashed

“Ensure equity, so everyone is treated the same, we said. Trashed.

“Be consistent we said. Trashed.

“Make clear ‘we are all in it together’. Trashed.”

Someone got onto the Civil Service twitter account and called Johnson “an arrogant truth-twister.” Nine minutes later, the tweet was taken down but it had been shared 25,000 times. No one knows who done it at the moment, but J.K. Rowling offered to pay them a year’s salary if their name became public.

A group called Led by Donkeys parked a van outside Cummings’ house with a huge screen on the back. It plays a clip of Boris Johnson telling people to stay home and  interviews with people who’ve struggled to care for their kids while they were sick. Over and over again.

The Financial Times writes that “The prime minister’s efforts to save his aide appeared to have failed. Support for Mr Cummings appeared to be spread thinly across the government and Conservative party. Following a barrage of supportive messages from cabinet ministers on Saturday, a notable silence on Sunday suggested that backing for the adviser was evaporating. One member of the government said the prime minister’s press conference had made the situation worse.”

One more quote, then I’ll stop: Former Brexit minister Steve Baker said the government was spending “enormous political capital…saving someone who has boasted of making decisions beyond his competence and clearly broke at the very least the guidance which kept mums and dads at home.”

Life’s going to be interesting around here for the next week or two. Watch this space. Or any other.